Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Dunmore Row ·
The Wishing Well of Late Coins
Coins dropped into the well at Dunmore Row come back up before their owners have finished climbing the steps, and each one bears the wrong year until it bears the right one.
- status: rumor
The well is at the foot of Dunmore Row, set into the wall below the eleventh step, and the steps above it are forty-two in number, steep enough that the row's older residents count their doctor's opinion as permission before use. The well has a lip of dressed stone, a coin slot worn into a bright-edged groove, and a small cast plate that once named the water, the wording of which was lost while there were still people alive whose grandmothers might have quoted it. Children are told not to drink from it. Everyone drinks from it once.
The custom is simple and unchanged. You stand at the bottom, you name your wish — aloud is preferred here, as the plate's lost wording is supposed to have required it — you drop the coin in the slot, and you climb the forty-two steps. By the time you are breathing hard at the top, the coin is back at the bottom, lying flat on the stone apron below the slot, always heads up, always in the same spot, as if returned by an office that processes in order.
The returned coins are stamped. That is the part that keeps the custom alive and the part that no visitor believes until they carry a torch.
Strictly speaking they are always stamped with the year. The trouble is which year. A woman named Beryl Nunn, who wished at the well monthly from 1961 until her knees objected, kept the returned dates in a lined book with the gravity of a customs agent, and the book proves the pattern: the coin comes back dated the year of the wish, unmistakably minted for it, even when — especially when — the coin you dropped was older. She dropped a shilling of her mother's, dated 1919, and got back a shilling cleanly struck with a lettering style that died decades before the well had steps, bearing the current year, and the shopkeepers of Dunmore Row took it without comment because by then six of them had taken one. Beryl's book has been seen and counted by people who had every reason to sneer. The dates run level and true with the calendar pages opposite them.
What the well does with the wishers' actual coins — the 1919 shilling, the coppers, the folded pound notes that certain residents insist worked once — is not addressed. The well returns a coin. It does not return your coin. This distinction matters to the row and is wasted on visitors, who put theirs in a pocket and throw nothing away, and so are never in credit.
The timing is the second fixed fact. The climb takes most adults between fifty and ninety seconds. The coin is on the apron when they arrive. It is never on the apron early — the row's constant bench-dwellers, who have watched the foot of the steps through one whole summer, are unanimous that the apron stays bare until the wisher is somewhere above the twentieth step — and it is never late. The well does not wait for the wish to clear the steps; it merely refuses to hurry the climb. On the one recorded occasion when a young man ran the forty-two steps in a dare, the coin was found in the slot itself, caught half-emerged, and young men are advised locally not to run.
What the wishes cost is the part the row does not discuss above a certain volume. The saying is that a wish granted is subtracted from somewhere in the year it is dated, and the row's savings, marriages, good weather and good health all carry a subtraction nobody can place, and every household keeps a private ledger of things that went missing in years when things went right. The saying goes no further. It is not a warning. Wishes continue. Beryl Nunn, asked at the last whether she regretted the shillings, said she had never missed a coin, only everything the coins eventually stood for, and that she would wish again tomorrow if the steps allowed.
There is no ferryman at the slot and no hand at the apron. Whatever keeps the order — and the row's phrase is keeps, as an office keeps, as a ledger keeps — has never once been seen, and the bench-dwellers consider that evidence of good management rather than of absence.
Who tells it today? Dunmore Row tells it, at the foot of the steps and nowhere else, to anyone holding a coin and forty-two steps' worth of breath, and it is told with the stamps held up to the light and the dates read out.